The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (7 page)

‘Is that a book in your pinny?’ she asked me presently.

‘It is,’ I said, showing her my tattered little volume of stories.

‘I wish I could fill a page like ye do, Manticory Swiney,’ she said. ‘And read. But the words do swim in front of my eyes like tadpoles themselves.’

Popular among the pupils for her crubeens alone, the butcher’s runt was generally in disgrace with my beloved Miss Finaughty. She was still at school, despite the nineteen years on her. They were masked by her slightness and the fact that she had failed to master her letters beyond a young child’s clumsy runes. The Eileen O’Reilly was a proud one, though. There was no other girl who could approach her in that respect. So she pretended that she had her letters: she pretended bravely, evidently having a good ear and a memory to match. But I had noticed how, when called to the blackboard, she always struggled to place her ‘t’s and ‘h’s in appropriate conjunction; her ‘p’s were back to front and her ‘h’s sometimes somersaulted upside down.

‘I’ll teach you to read,’ I offered. ‘There’s a great pleasure in the thing once you stop suffering over it.’

‘See the big words trippin’ out of your mouth, even in the state ye are in,’ she marvelled. ‘Big but worth the money.’

The Eileen O’Reilly commenced to cry again. ‘Would you really be so kind, and me always raggin’ on your sister Darcy?’

I murmured, ‘It is the greatest comfort to me that you do. Consider it by way of thanks to me.’

Darcy’s voice boomed out of the dark, ‘Well isn’t this so very cosy? And is it the runt having herself a little old snivel? Perhaps she’d like something to snivel about?’

‘Bad manners to ye, Darcy Swiney. Ye are a baste of a girl for wanting to be fought wid—’

I felt the blow to the Eileen O’Reilly’s ear as if I had taken it myself. She stumbled off into the darkness of the lane, howling, ‘I’ll call the consthables on ye, Darcy Swiney. And up that arse on ye with a crooked stick besides.’

Darcy harrumphed and pummelled me to my feet. I watched her face anxiously for any sign that she had overheard the part of my conversation with the Eileen O’Reilly in which I promised to teach the girl to read. But Darcy was muttering cheerfully again about the foxy gentleman on the bridge. Then she stopped short and glared into my face.

‘Were you telling the butcher’s runt about him at all?’ she demanded. ‘Is that what you were moaning and weeping about?’

With the full force of truth, I answered, ‘No, I would not tell her any more than I would tell . . . the seaweed boy.’

Satisfied, Darcy hauled me inside the cottage, where Enda folded me in her arms. ‘Manticory, I was that worried! Hours, you’ve been out there. Come here, sweetheart, you’re wet as dew! For why do you look so sorry?’

Annora poured me a thimbleful of buttermilk and kissed the top of my head while I drank it. She wiped the tears off my face with a clean rag.

Then, and every stretched minute afterwards, I longed for the solid comfort of confessing everything to Enda and it was sorely lonesome to keep a secret from her. I longed for Annora to take my part and bring down God’s wrath on the troll. But I was too afraid to disobey Darcy’s injunction of silence, especially because I could not fathom her delight in the situation or her calculating look every time she laid eyes on me for the rest of the week.

Nor could I meet Miss Finaughty’s eye the next day or rejoice in the volume of Thackeray she pressed into my hand.

‘Are you sickening for something?’ she asked.

The Eileen O’Reilly was not at school. I worried that Darcy had deafened her for life with that blow or put some great hurt across her brain.

I managed to keep the secret of the man on the bridge until Sunday. By then I had decided that not even Darcy would have me withhold him from God. I calculated finely, finding I was slightly less afraid of Darcy than of a long slow roast in Purgatory. For my confession, I struggled to assess whether my part in the incident constituted a venial, grave or mortal sin, so I listed it as an evil that was a tint worse than a sharp word to Ida, somewhere between grave and mortal.

When I mumbled my little rigmarole about how I had disobliged a fine gentleman on Harristown Bridge, Father Maglinn tugged hard at the single hair I’d fed as usual through the grate for him to hold.

‘So you tempted a man away to a copse?’ He began to ply a welter of questions as to the disposition of various bodily parts, the man’s and my own. I could not force myself to revisit the scene in such detail; I cried silently.

‘But is it a good girl you still are yourself ?’ Father Maglinn demanded squeakily.

Was I still a good girl myself ? I assured him in sobs that I was, but the fact was that his very query had just possessed me with the opposite of goodness. I was suddenly seething with black anger from my scalp to my bony behind numbing on the wooden bench.

For should not the priest have asked, ‘Were you grossly imposed on, poor child? Where is the divil that did it? You shall be comforted and the evil done unto you shall be dealt with!’

I was reminded of my confession by a rasp at the grate. Father Maglinn was huffing like bellows.

‘Is there any other sin you’d like to be telling me about?’ he asked greedily.

I blurted, ‘I think Darcy did away with our father and buried him in the clover field.’

‘What’s that you’re blethering? Phelan Swiney dead?’ asked the priest. ‘Your mind is running away with you, child, tugged along by that heathen-coloured hair on you. ’Tis round the village that you’ve your nose in some book every second minute. The stories are breeding in you like worms, child. Don’t be trying to load your sins on your poor sister Darcy. She’s very frightful in herself, that girl, I’ll give you, but your wanton slander is the worse evil. Ten Hail Marys just for that alone. And for the rest . . .’

He laid a clatter of penances on me.

I did not say them. I had some other words for God and his henchman Maglinn. God had sent the English and the Famine down on Ireland. He had allowed Darcy to be the way she was. And as God saw all, so He had seen the troll on Harristown Bridge. Had He sent down a fork of lightning to spear that man through his dark heart? No, He had countenanced the evil quite tranquilly. Bad luck to Him! I shouted my thoughts out loud to the hedgerows on the way home, half expecting them to wither at the root. They did not, just to prove my point.

I brooded a week on His failings, until Darcy beat the back of my legs with a rake, ‘To put the smile back on you, which would be a small improvement on that sad puss you’re wearing.’

Annora dosed me with something swarthy in a bottle from the Kilcullen dispensary. When Miss Finaughty asked me what was ailing me, I simply shook my head.

‘And where is the Eileen O’Reilly?’ she asked my assembled schoolfellows. ‘Does anybody know?’

Two dozen faces answered her with hungry silence.

Mass, the following Sunday, merely confirmed me on my Godless path, for I received the additional revelation that half the men in the chapel, while watching the Swiney girls at song, were doing the same thing with their eyes as the gentleman had done on the bridge. I even saw some fingers coiling and uncoiling in their laps as they mimicked my Harristown Bridge gentleman’s unravelling of my hair. I imagined foxtails swishing behind them in their pews. There would never be any getting away from them. The men would be doing the same at St Joseph’s Chapel over in Yellow Bog and at the Sacred Heart in Kilcullen. The whole of County Kildare, no – Ireland – was full to the brim of men who loved to prey on girls’ hair, the brutal-looking foxy devils! I clamped my teeth down on the communion wafer and crunched God’s Body in angry bites.

Was it only the Catholics? The third Sunday after the troll, on the way to chapel, I told my sisters I was cramping in the belly. Darcy eyed me sharply. I felt her black gaze on my back as I hobbled away, theatrically resting against the sodden trunks of trees from time to time until I believed myself safe from scrutiny.

Instead of returning home, I ran down the back paths to Carnalway where the Anglicans kept their so-called Church of Ireland establishment. Annora would have wanted me exorcised merely for standing in its graceful shadow. I hid behind the La Touche family crypt by the graveyard and crept into the outer vestibule only after the service had started so that I might observe proceedings while the congregation had its back to me. I peered up at the polished wooden barrel of a roof and read the words
Holy
,
Holy
,
Holy
picked out in Gothic gold script over blue in an arch above the altar. Annora’s frail influence proved stronger than I’d thought it could be for I began to shake. The heretics chanted their unholy songs and I felt myself close to fainting. A shaft of sunlight gilded the clean heads of the men in the last row, the one closest to me. I emitted a quiet sob and one of those heads turned to me. It was the man from Harristown Bridge, holding his hymn book in the hand he’d laid on me.

At the same moment, Darcy’s hand clapped the back of my neck.

‘That’s him, is it?’ she hissed in my ear. ‘Your foxy old troll?’

She rubbed her third finger against her thumb. Then she pointed to me, struggling in the custody of her other hand. She pressed her finger to her lips.

He nodded, bloodlessly.

Darcy grinned like a snake and dragged me outside. When the service was over, the man emerged quickly, ahead of the congregation.

Darcy impaled him on the trajectory of her stare. He writhed a bit and then his morale settled down to die. Behind the La Touche crypt, with me crumpled at her feet, he counted the coins into Darcy’s hands until she unfixed her eyes from him.

When my sisters came tramping home from chapel, I was sitting on the bob-seat by the fire, stirring seaweed soup in the three-legged pot on the backstone, and reading a Bible verse to Annora. The tears had stiffened on my cheeks and my chest had ceased its heaving. Darcy was out in the yard, patting down the soil under which she had just buried her bounty.

She’s a good one for burying things
, I noted sourly.

Chapter 7

How much Grey Manchester, White Richmond, White Duchess and Drab Sateen lacing passed through Annora’s wet hands in those thin years? She was nearly transparent with the taken-in washing and with the wringing of her hands over the state of her purse.

Like many Catholic girls, Darcy and the twins were earning now, crocheting Thornton lace panels and boudoir slippers, seated around a single candle with three bottles placed in front of it to magnify the light. But they had come into the business too late. The rival lace-makers of Clones were in the ascendant. And the thin geese were overly fascinated by the lace-making. Every so often, one of them caused a great commotion by flying up to the window and launching itself through a lace flounce in its frame, ruining the work of three days. Poor tousled Ida was kept home from school to chase the geese away. School was not doing for her what it should, anyway, on account of what Annora called her ‘airy fits’.

Evenings, I myself was put to work writing missives for the many Harristown folk who did not have their letters. Joe the seaweed boy brought me commissions from his own village on the coast to supplement my earnings. Unbeknownst to Darcy, I did Joe free favours for his mother. His brother was a Fenian who’d run off to America on her. Joe’s mother relied on me to read his letters to her boy, who memorised them and repeated them all the slow way home. The journey took Joe an age because his horse had been bled too many times in the Hunger and walked like the corpse it nearly was.

The united labours of the Swiney sisters did not provide enough to feed us. And all the while we were trying to grow, and our prodigious hair wound like a voracious parasite around our heads, seeming to consume all our small helpings of food before it reached our stomachs.

‘The Lord will open a gap for us soon,’ Annora promised, and she offered up novenas for the rich ladies of Dublin to prosper in their love of lace and for a long-distance romance to bloom between an illiterate Harristown labourer and a girl away in Dublin to keep me in love letters.

Darcy wanted more than seaweed soup and the barley stirabout, which was no longer made with buttermilk since the last cow died, but was thinned to skilly with water. The troll gentleman’s bounty had soon been spent on a new hat. Darcy wanted the best of everything, and plenty of it.

Even as the poorhouse in Naas pointed a finger at the Swiney cottage, Darcy was after elegance, and cream. And salted herring from Mrs Diarmid, who sent to Cork for a barrel of fresh from time to time.

‘Phooey! And is the Lord going to see to the new dress I deserve?’ Darcy would demand. ‘Does the Lord personally expect me to go in rags, is it? And eat skinny slops? So much the worse for Him!’ She swung a fist at the seashell lamp.

‘You’ve always had an extra ruffle round your smock more than anyone else. And the biggest of the potatoes. God shall see that your bad temper brings you great sorrow, to be sure, Darcy,’ warned Annora.

Darcy was not long about an answer. ‘My temper shall bring sorrow to others, I believe.’ She grinned at me and I cowered in my seat.

‘Don’t you care to bring a drop of happiness to your mother?’ whinnied Annora. ‘Out of daughterly love, Darcy?’